Sinwar memo shows Hamas planned 10,000-terrorist invasion, feared nuclear retaliation

Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar envisioned 10,000-terrorist invasion of Israel, and believed Israel would respond by using nuclear weapons against Gaza.

By World Israel News Staff

A handwritten document attributed to former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar shows that he anticipated Israel might respond to a large-scale invasion from Gaza with overwhelming force, potentially including a nuclear weapon, but continued developing the attack plan regardless.

The August 24, 2022, memorandum was released by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center on Monday after being recovered by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. It describes a significantly larger operation than the Hamas-led assault ultimately carried out on October 7, 2023.

According to the document, Sinwar envisioned sending approximately 10,000 terrorists across the border, seizing key road junctions, attacking more than 220 Israeli communities and overwhelming military installations before Israel could organize an effective response.

The plan called for 25 simultaneous breaches of the Gaza border barrier, each aligned with a strategically important junction. Groups of 100 specially trained terrorists were to capture each junction and obstruct the movement of Israeli reinforcements.

Sinwar allocated another 2,210 terrorists to attacks on 221 kibbutzim and other small communities, 1,600 to eight larger communities, 1,200 to Israeli cities and 2,000 to military bases, according to the published excerpts.

The compartmentalized operation was designed so that individual units would know only their assigned missions rather than the full scope of the plan.

Sinwar’s instructions also outlined what Hamas terrorists should do with the populations of captured communities.

“The goal is to expel the settlers with their vehicles,” he wrote, using Hamas terminology for Israeli residents.

The document reportedly gave priority to removing women and children while calling for men between the ages of 17 and 50 to be taken hostage. Terrorists were instructed to seize mobile phones and documents carried by those they encountered.

The plan’s emphasis on vehicles appears to indicate that Hamas intended to use cars taken from residents to move deeper into Israel, transport captives or support additional assault waves.

Sinwar believed the initial surprise would throw Israel into disorder, but he did not expect that advantage to last. He predicted that Israel would eventually use every weapon available to it.

“They may even use an atomic bomb, no less,” Sinwar wrote.

Despite that assessment, he described the planned confrontation as “a campaign of life or death” and called for a mass Palestinian movement into abandoned or captured Israeli communities to symbolically reclaim villages from before Israel’s establishment.

The Meir Amit center said the memo demonstrated that Sinwar understood an invasion could bring catastrophic consequences for the Gaza Strip but remained committed to his broader ideological objective.

Israel has maintained a longstanding policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor denying possession of nuclear weapons. It is widely believed outside Israel to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal and is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The scale described in the 2022 plan exceeded the force ultimately used on October 7.

The IDF estimates that approximately 5,600 terrorists crossed into Israel during the attack, including about 3,500 Hamas members, roughly 580 Palestinian Islamic Jihad members and approximately 1,400 other Gazans.

Hamas-led attackers killed around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducted 251 others to Gaza.

The newly released material adds operational details to portions of the same six-page memorandum reported publicly in October 2025.

Earlier disclosures showed that Sinwar directed Hamas units to attack civilian areas, burn communities and film violent acts for rapid distribution through television and social media. The stated purpose was to spread fear, destabilize Israeli society and encourage Palestinians elsewhere to join the fighting.

The memo called for residential areas to be set on fire using gasoline or diesel carried in tankers. It also encouraged terrorists to create and broadcast deliberately shocking scenes.

Seized communications from October 7 later showed Hamas field commanders ordering gunmen to burn homes, kill people encountered on roads and take large numbers of hostages, according to previous reporting based on Israeli intelligence material.

A digitized copy of the memorandum was reportedly discovered in May 2025 on an offline computer inside an underground complex used by Mohammed Sinwar, Yahya Sinwar’s brother and successor in Gaza.

Seven Israeli officials told The New York Times that they believed Yahya Sinwar wrote the document. Sima Ankona, a former Israeli police document examiner consulted by the newspaper, reportedly found that the handwriting matched known samples, including a note Sinwar sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018.

The latest excerpts were provided by the IDF to the Meir Amit center and were initially reported by Israel’s Channel 12 before being published more widely.

The documents form part of a growing collection of Hamas records recovered during Israeli operations in Gaza.

Other seized materials have indicated that Hamas spent years considering broader attacks, sought assistance from Iran and Hezbollah and viewed regional diplomatic developments—including possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia—as threats to its strategy.

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